Friday, April 28, 2006

What Dreams May Come

Take what you have gathered from coincidence - Bob Dylan

In Dante, Tennessee at about 6:30 on the morning of November 6, 1957, a 12-year old boy named Everett Clark opened the door to let out his dog, Frisky. Everett glimpsed a brilliant object sitting in a field about 100 yards away, but was too tired to think much of it and went back inside. Twenty minutes later he returned to call Frisky, and saw his dog standing near the object, along with several other dogs from the neighbourhood. "Also near the object," writes Jacques Vallee inDimensions, "were two men and two women in ordinary clothing":

One of the men made several attempts to catch Frisky, and later another dog, but had to give up for fear of being bitten. Everett saw the strange people, who talked between them 'like German soldiers he had seen in movies,' walk right into the wall of the object, which then took off straight up without sound. It was oblong and of 'no particular colour.'

Early on the evening of the same day, in Everittstown New Jersey, John Tasco went out to feed his dog and saw a "brilliant egg-shaped object hovering in front of his barn," and encountered a dwarfish entity with a pasty face and frog-like eyes dressed in a green suit with shiny buttons and a tam-o'-shanter like cap who said, in broken English, "We are peaceful people, we only want your dog." When Tasco replied that the dog stayed with him, the entity retreated and his pet was found unharmed.

If we have the courage to appear foolish by looking closer, what do we find: two discrete and bizarre accounts from the same day of seemingly thwarted UFO-linked dog-nappings, one early dawn and the other early dusk, one told by a boy named Everett and the other from a town sharing the boy's name. In one the frustrated abductors resembled "German soldiers" but were able to pass through the wall of their craft, and in the other the entity had a leprechaun-like appearence. (Additionally, John Keel writes in The Eighth Tower that on the evening of November 6 in 1957 outside Kearney, Nebraska, a fertilizer salesmen named Reinhold Schmidt was given a tour of an oblong craft by German-speaking pilots and a truck driver near House, Mississippi encountered pasty-faced dwarfs who "babbled in a language he couldn't understand.")

Vallee adds, "the stories quoted in this connection verge on the ludicrous. But to pursue the investigation further leads to horror. This is a facet of the phenomenon we can no longer ignore."

Maybe the synchronicities are the point. Perhaps they're little tells by the universe that say, Pay attention to the fabric here, because you're a part of it.

John Keel documents many similar winks in The Eighth Tower. In the mid-1960s, unrelated people who shared only the surname "Reeve" became subjected to frequent, and statistically aberrant, visitations of the phenomenon. A man named Alvis Maddox was one of the victims of the collapse of the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, a tragedy that signalled the climax of the Mothman flap. Three months later, a deputy sheriff in Texas named Alvis Maddox was involved in an otherwise unrelated and widely published UFO sighting. The weirdness of Point Pleasant, West Virginia was followed by sightings in Point Pleasant, New Jersey.

Keel writes:

The law of synchronicity has created a fascinating statistical anomaly that suggest that witnesses are not accidental but are actually selected. In fact, the deeper you penetrate into this business, the more obvious it becomes that very little chance is involved. The sightings follow preset geographical and time patterns. In the seemingly chance contacts they often carry out repetitive actions that almost seem rehearsed.

Did the entities allegedly encountered by Clark and Tasco really want their dogs? There is an almost comic futility about their attempts, reminiscent of the seemingly intentional failures of the phantom clowns and phantom social workers to abduct children in the 1980s. They were demonstrations. Naturally we'll want to ask Of what, but perhaps that's not a meaningful question here. Perhaps it's the fact of demonstration and its attendent synchronicities and not its content that is most significant, because it's a manifestation in the mundane world of a normally hidden order of reality and congruity. At least it can be said that the demonstrations are for us, and that the patterns exist in order to draw our attention. Patterns like those in the fields emulating the standing waves of a voidless, holographic universe percolating with energy.

We likely know by our experience of them that synchronicities don't pertain only to borderland experiences. However, they do all lead us to borderland issues of human consciousness.

In 1906 Carl Jung found a young patient diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic staring out of his ward window at the sun, moving his head from side to side. Jung asked him what he was doing, and the man explained he was watching the sun's penis, and moving his head it moved as well, and caused the wind to blow. Several years later, as Michael Talbot recounts in The Holographic Universe, Jung read a translation of an ancient Persian religious text that consisted of a "series of rituals and invocations designed to bring on visions":

It described one of the visions and said that if the participant looked at the sun he would see a tube hanging down from it, and when the tube moved from side to side it would cause the wind to blow. Since circumstances made it extremely unlikely that the man had contact with the text containing the ritual, Jung concluded that the man's vision was not simply a product of his unconscious mind, but had bubbled up from a deeper level, from the collective unconscious of the human race itself.

Perhaps madness may be said to be close to genius, or the psychotic to the mystic, because certain mental illnesses disable our holographic readers, leaving a paranoid schizophrenic with a inate sense of the interconnectedness of things but without a way of interpretation, and so a crippling ego confusion settles in.

But collectivity is not a trait of merely the unconcious mind, since one of its common aspects is also our everyday synchronicities: the little moments that tell us we're not observers of the universe set apart from it but its engaged components; and that our thoughts and even our dreams are not thought and dreamt in isolation. (In the 1960s and '70s Dr Montague Ullman's Dream Laboratory at Brooklyn's Maimonides Medical Center generating extraordinary data suggesting a test subject's dreams could be influenced by the psychic effort of someone unknown to them concentrating on an image in another room.

For instance, in one series of tests the target picture was Chagall's Paris Through the Window: a "colorful painting depicting a man observing the Paris skyline from a window. Certain unusual elements stand out very clearly: a cat with a human face, several small figures of men flying in the air, and flowers sprouting from a chair."

Results from the test subject's Third Dream Period:

I was walking. For some reason, I say French Quar­ter .... And I was walking through different departments in a department store ... talking with a group of Shriners that were having a convention. They had on a hat that looked more like a French policeman's hat, you know the French .... I said French Quarter earlier, but I was using that to get a feel. . . of an early village of some sort .... It would be some sort of this romantic type of archi­tecture-buildings, village, quaint.

Fifth Dream Period:

The memory I remember is a man, once again walking through one of these villages, these towns. It would definitely be in the nineteenth century. Attire. French attire. And he would be walking through one of these towns as though he were walking up the side of a hill above other layers of the town.

An excerpt from the subject's notes of associative material:

The thing that stands out is the dream where I described the village .... It's a festive thing ... the Mardi Gra­ish type .... Well, the area must be - I mean, just basing it on the costumes and all - the nineteenth century. Early nineteenth century ... either the Italian or French or Spanish area .... A town of this area .... It would be of the...of this village type .... Houses very close covering the hills.

Not much has come of this research because psi is still a foreign language, sounding like gibberish, to much of the scientific establishment. Perhaps more profoundly, the empowering implications of human paraconnectivity is something not to be encouraged by forces which mean to keep us divided, dejected and impotent.

Frederick Taylor Gates was a businessman and philanthropist who helped the Rockefellers spend their money and steered John D. Jr. towards a life-long interest in education. In his 1906 Occasional Letter No. 1, a publication of the General Education Board, a philanthropy he co-created with the Rockefellers to allegedly "support higher education and medical schools in the United States, and to help Black schools in the South," Gates and Rockefeller had their own dreams:

In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply.

The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

Dr Walter Freeman, President of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in 1948 whose assembly-line ice-pick procedure lobotomized Frances Farmer, didn't like his dreams. Having scared himself with a nervous breakdown brought on by overwork, he took up the habit of at least three capsules of Nembutal every night to induce dreamless sleep. In the 1950s he wrote that lobotomies "made good American citizens" out of "schizophrenics, homosexuals, and radicals."

Public philosopher Jane Jacobs died Tuesday morning at 89. She's best remembered today for her Silent Spring of urban planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but someday it may be for her last book, Dark Age Coming, published in 2004. About its subject Jacobs wrote:

We in North America and Western Europe, enjoying the many benefits of the culture conventionally known as the West, customarily think of a Dark Age as happening once, long ago, following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. But in North America we live in a graveyard of lost aboriginal cultures, many of which were decisively finished off by mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was also lost.

Mass amnesia, striking as it is and seemingly weird, is the least mysterious of Dark Age phenomena. We all understand the harsh principle Use it or lose it. A failing or conquered culture can spiral down into a long decline, as has happened in most empires after their relatively short heydays of astonishing success. But in extreme cases, failing or conquered cultures can be genuinely lost, never to emerge again as living ways of being. The salient mystery of Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes literally lost?

Mass amnesia, like a Dark Age, can be intentionally induced. Ice-picks are effective as a tool of forgetting, but even Dr Freeman when up to speed could only lobotomize one at a time. There are more efficient methods for a mass culture that by its nature may be catastrophically amnesiac. Though there's so much we don't need to forget, because we've never learned the plenum we contain.

"The Empire never ended," wrote Philip K Dick. But he also added, "Against the Empire is posed the living information." The patterns, synchronicities, cryptograms and codes that are forever creating the universe, and us with it, because that's the stuff of which we're made.

Yes i know and have seen a ufo myself here in North Bergen,New Jersey.

The UFO craze in North Bergen began in earnest on January 12, 1975, when a 72-year-old liquor store owner named George O'Barski was driving home through North Hudson Braddock Park at approximately 2:45 a.m. He began to experience some heavy static on his car radio. Then the radio went dead.

O'Barski, who is now deceased, apparently heard a loud noise from above. When he glanced over his shoulder, he saw a round, flat object with glowing, rectangular windows that hovered behind his car.

O'Barski later told federal officials that the object came to a stop about 100 feet ahead of his car. It was hovering 10 feet off the ground and was about 30 feet wide. It was flat at the bottom and brightly domed at the top.

O'Barski said that a ladder came from the object, and somewhere between eight and 11 creatures, all looking identical, emerged. They were about three, perhaps four feet tall and all wore dark snow-suit like uniforms with helmets. Each had a small bag and a little shovel. They quickly scooped up soil samples, poured the samples into the little bags, and immediately got back onto the craft.

Close encounters of the Hudson kind

The obviously frightened and startled O'Barski told federal officials that the entire episode lasted like three minutes. At sunrise, O'Barski went back to North Hudson Braddock Park to make sure he wasn't dreaming. There were several holes in the soil where he had witnessed the aliens allegedly digging.

But O'Barski was not alone with his sighting.

A doorman who was working at the Stonehenge apartment complex across from the park on the other side of Boulevard East also noticed the glowing object hovering 100 feet over Braddock Park, he told law enforcement officials. The doorman, whose actual identity has not been revealed and now cannot be found, said that when the object started its ascent, it forced windows to be shattered in the apartment complex and split a large tree adjacent to the complex in half.

It was also later revealed that O'Barski and the unnamed Stonehenge doorman did not know each other, and it was impossible for the two to collaborate on their stories.

The doorman at the Stonehenge also noticed something else: The creature he spotted was not wearing a coat and the temperatures were in the teens that early morning.

UFO experts investigate

The O'Barski case intrigued two people who are now linked in the world of UFO investigation.

Ted Bloecher was an experienced stage actor, having performed in "Guys and Dolls," "My Fair Lady," and "Oliver" on Broadway. But as a child, Bloecher was always fascinated with the study of UFOs (called ufology) and eventually became totally engulfed in O'Barski's tale.

Bloecher, now a regular UFO investigator, went to interview O'Barski about his experience with the creatures, later referred to in reports as "humanoids" because of their appearance.

He said he believes the creatures were just pretending to get soil samples.

"Since I'm an experienced stage actor, I know very well what is a staged act and what is real," Bloecher said. "The scene of them getting soil samples was fake. It was staged. Their real target was George O'Barski. They weren't interested in soil samples. They wanted him."

Another UFO researcher who was intrigued by the O'Barski story was a writer named Budd Hopkins. In fact, both Bloecher and Hopkins were so intrigued by O'Barski's saga - a story that both experts eventually believed to be real after interviewing O'Barski - that they have since teamed forces in the pursuit of other "close encounters."

The two currently conduct UFO sighting seminars throughout the country.

The reason Hopkins was so fascinated by the O'Barski sighting is that Hopkins had just visited a friend inside the Stonehenge apartments in North Bergen a week before the sighting.

"It was more than a bizarre coincidence," Hopkins would later say.

Newspaper reports were minimal after the O'Barski incident. Both the local dailies, the Jersey Journal and the now-defunct Hudson Dispatch, gave the incident a few paragraphs each.

According to O'Barski's son, George, Jr., his father went to his grave thoroughly believing that what he saw that fateful evening did in fact take place.

"We might have thought he was a little crazy at first, but he was certain that he saw what he did," George O'Barski, Jr. said on a recently aired A&E Network special about UFOs that focused on the North Bergen phenomenon. "It really bothered my father that people thought he was lying."

As it turned out, O'Barski wasn't alone.

The Stith sense

In 1979, North Bergen resident Harold Stith was driving through North Hudson Braddock Park in almost the same exact location that O'Barski had traveled four years prior. Again, it was at nighttime.

"My father was driving home from work, driving on Boulevard East, and he turned into the [Braddock] park," said Harold's son, Robert Stith, who lives in Secaucus. "As soon as he turned off into the park, his car just stopped dead. Then the radio went dead. A bright light came on top of the car, and then my father heard some strange things on the radio, some language that he didn't understand. He then noticed it was some sort of spaceship. The doors of the ship opened and these little grey men with big eyes came out. The next thing my father knew was that the door shut and they flew off. He thought it was like 10 minutes, but as it turned out, it was like three hours. My mother said that my father came home three hours late."

Hopkins, who also investigated the Stith case, believes that Stith was abducted.

"He believed that he was abducted," Robert Stith said. "We all thought he was crazy. He didn't want the story to come out because other people would have thought he was nuts."

Two days after Stith had his close encounter, he told his family that he had a dream about the Miss America pageant.

"My father named the winner, what she wore, what she performed, where she was from," Robert Stith said. "No one took it seriously. We didn't have an affiliation with the pageant, and we had no idea why he would pick the Miss America winner."

Harold Stith's prediction came true. Two weeks later, it all happened just like Stith predicted. Cheryl Prewitt of Mississippi, the one Stith named after his dream, was crowned Miss America of 1980.

"I don't think he ever had a theory as to why he could have done that," Robert Stith said.

Again, there was a small article written in the Hudson Dispatch about several people spotting a glowing object in North Hudson Braddock Park that evening.

Eighties and '90s

The local reports to the National UFO Reporting Center came to a halt for a few years, until 1985, when Ron Lee said he saw three stationary sets of lights in the area, all oval in shape. Then the lights took off into the sky.

Ninetta Nappi reported the same lights as "racing blips."

In 1988, two different North Bergen residents reported shapes that looked like "white and green diamonds" flying over Braddock Park.

In 1993, a North Bergen school teacher, Ann Barlovich, reported seeing a "large elliptical light with an eerie glow, a blimp-like object."

"I know what I saw and it wasn't like anything else I'd ever seen before," Barlovich said in the A&E special. In 1999, a resident of the Parker Imperial condominium complex said that he was standing on his balcony and was ready to take a picture of the sunset, when he noticed something peculiar. The man took the picture, then downloaded the picture to his computer and noticed three weird orbs in the photo.

"I really didn't see the orbs when I took the picture," said the resident. "Only when I reviewed it later." However, he refused to show the photos to the North Bergen Reporter.

2003

On November 3, 2003, the last two sightings were reported to the National UFO Reporting Center, both from near Braddock Park.

At 5:40 p.m. that day, two North Bergen residents reported seeing something in the dusky sky. One witness saw something that looked like a star, but then it moved in circles, then in a zig-zag motion. It moved for about five seconds, stopped for a bit, then continued the circular and zigzagging routine. Another witness saw the same exact thing.

"At first I thought that my vision was playing with me, or may be the clouds, but I tried looking at other stars, and they did not move at all," reads the report on the National UFO Reporting Center board. "After an hour, the light became steady and stopped moving. I do not know if what I saw was a UFO, but it was too high to be a plane or a helicopter."

Even Peter Jennings knows

ABC News anchor Peter Jennings did a special report on UFOs in November of 2004, and he hinted about the number of sightings in North Bergen, wondering if it was just coincidence or fact-based. The A&E special report also focused an entire hour on the North Bergen sightings, especially the famed O'Barski sighting that happened 30 years ago this year.

In the ABC report, the network said that almost 50 percent of Americans believe that UFOs are real, not to mention millions of individuals in other countries. Federal records of the reports have never been released to the public.

Police comment

North Bergen Police Chief William Galvin, a native of the township, remembers the craze from when he was a 21-year-old who had yet to become a police officer.

"I just remember the hype, and then I just saw the (A&E) special on TV, and it reminded me," Galvin said. "We laugh about it. No one has ever received a call reporting a UFO to the Police Department. It is a mind boggling number to think so many have been reported them here. But as far as I know, I don't remember anyone calling the police with these cases. We might have got a call or two about strange objects, but no one ever made a big deal about it. I can't believe we're No. 1 on that list. It amazes me."

Police Captain Robert Farley, a 32-year veteran of the department, said that he didn't even know about the sightings until the recent A&E special.

"I never knew anything about it," Farley said.

But obviously, the cases were reported. So when local people watch "War of the Worlds," they can wonder whether aliens already visited the largest recreational area in Hudson County 30 years ago.

Hey Jeff. I was wondering if you were ever going to dedicate a post to the theories of PKD (not to mention the eerily relevent events that inspired them, and how they relate to the ideas touched upon in last few entries.

Links, dots and chains and the circle goes unbroken. The circle measures as Pi and the one millionth decimal place is one. Heinlein suggests that we need at least 2 decimal places which is suggestive of three. Jung suffered from a recurring dream of a huge erect penis in an underground vault. He and Freud were sitting at a large oaken table that suddenly exploded with an explosive noise revealing a large crack. Jung called it syncronicity

The circle is not discovered by drawing the line point to point but drawing the line in close proximity between the points.

The holographic image needs three points. The dream is the fourth point yet to be mapped. Manipulate the dreamer and the point into the next dimension has been distorted.

The Dark Ages were the natural product of the common doctrine and declaration that Jesus is G-d, resulting from the consul of Nicea.

With the mind no longer encouraged to look for more subtle truths within the sacred texts, categories became ‘fixed’, with a design of supporting a corrupt and corrupting power structure.

The 'fixing' of categories provides security to the simple mind, but it scares the hell out of the more subtle thinker. O great, now I have to suck up to that conventional wisdom alwaws trying to coerce me. Because thats how we get ahead. Well, Bkankty blank-mutter-mutter-blank.

JEFF, AN AMAZING POST AS USUAL. I AM SO GLAD YOU POSTED A NEW ENTRY. YOUR WRITING IS SO GOOD THAT I GET ANXIOUS IF YOU DO NOT WRITE FOR AWHILE. MUST BUY MORE PRINTING INK. CAN'T WAIT FOR THE BOOK. YOU HAVE OPENED MY MIND TO SO MANY THINGS. AND TRUTH. THERE IS NO TRUTH LEFT IN AMERICAN JOURNLISM, ESPECIALLY TV.I CANNOT THANK YOU ENOUGH FOR YOUR BLOG. IT KEEPS ME SANE OR PREVENTS THE INSANITY THAT BUSHMONSTER AND HIS EVIL HENCHMEN WANT TO INSTILL IN THE AMERICAN POPULACE.

In one of Colin Wilson's works (my books are all packed up ATM - perhaps someone else can provide the cite) he speaks of certain cases of people with brains that are largely fluid, covered over with a thin layer of cortex. While most people with this condition are severely retarded, there are known instances of such people showing normal or above normal intelligence. Wilson goes on to speculate on the idea of the brain not as an organ of thought, but as some sort of receiver for thought that arises outside of the body. The idea's an odd one, yet in many ways attractive for the number of loose ends it ties up.

jeff, i just wanted to relay to you i felt a tingle of deja vu when i read:

"Perhaps madness may be said to be close to genius, or the psychotic to the mystic, because certain mental illnesses disable our holographic readers, leaving a paranoid schizophrenic with a inate sense of the interconnectedness of things but without a way of interpretation, and so a crippling ego confusion settles in."

Nice job, Jeff! Your preceding post, which got some blog circulation, was lucid and stayed on-theme: that maybe the Iranian president isn't as much a nut job as our own nut jobs would make him out to be. The curious might be drawn to take a look at RI, and what do they find, very next post? The usual hobo's-soup of warmed over dorm-room reflection. "Are you sure it was the same black cat?" "I'm not sure," said Neo. Ahhhhh, the audience nods--a glitch in the Matrix! A giant Kaluza-space of vaporings, and a nifty flash-bang grenade to distract the blognoscenti.

I know, I know--just change the channel if you don't like what's on. That part we know. "At least it can be said that the demonstrations are for us, and that the patterns exist in order to draw our attention."

I have often wondered if the bizarrely orchestrated manifestations from the "other side" are intended to wake us from the slumber of consensual reality, and if the occasionally shocking cruelty is just a particularly harsh aspect of this 'waking' campaign - like dumping cold water on a slug-a-bed. Perhaps even the strangest, cruelest 'border crossings' have a benevolent motive.

I'm normally a bit more skeptical toward the topics on this blog than many of the commenters. But I found this short bit, on the possible nature of the "abduction" phenomenon, to be quite intriguing. It's from an interview with British (now US-resident) UFO researcher Nicholas Redfern. It's based on an interview regarding his latest book, which deals with governmental monitoring of UFO investigators due to (probably misplaced but at least plausible) concern they might be working on behalf of hostile governments. (Note that I haven't read his book, and thus don't know whether there's any more detail or sourcing provided in the book itself.)

Certain people within the military and intelligence world came to the conclusion in the early through to the late 70s that actually a lot of what we call these abductions are actually an ingeniously created cover story and that these creatures are not aliens and are far stranger and in many ways more disturbing. I have now interviewed about 12 or 13 retired military people that were actually directly involved in the surveillance of abductees and they came to the conclusion that these things were kind of like tied in with the realm of the dead. They weren't aliens but were some sort of poorly understood phenomenon that interacts with our species…………………….

SM: You use the word "demonic" in the book.

NR: Yes, that's one of the things that came up that there was a fear on the part of the military and intelligence world that these creatures were demonic like and that they fed tulpa style on human souls and that their purpose in interacting with us was to harvest human souls as a kind of emotional feeding for themselves.

I'm thinking that our current corporatist M.O., the “way” we do things, the current “system” that “runs” this country - where the masses are trained to be good "consumers", to consume and discard, always looking for the "low, low price", or better investors, while simultaneously being driven by profit, profit, profit.... and ONLY profit - has increasingly conditioned us to forget. And if there is any review, it is merely superficial.

Therefore, we are destined to forget, and to become really good at it.

The elements that gave us real understanding, and the ability to rigorously examine, are continuously being diminished or entirely eliminated. Where is our ability to critically reason?

The proverbial dog chasing its tail in an ever smaller circle…..until it forgets it is chasing its tail.

Basically, this is how the system works:

1. Start with a cage containing five apes. In the cage, hang a banana on a string and put stairs under it. Before long, an ape will go to the stairs and start to climb for the banana.

2. As soon as the ape touches the stairs, spray all of the apes with cold water. After a while, another ape makes an attempt with the same result – all the apes are sprayed with cold water.

3. Turn off the cold water. If, later, another ape tries to climb the stairs, the other apes will prevent it even though no water sprays them.

4. Now, remove one ape from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new ape sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his horror, all of the apes attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.

5. Next, remove another of the original five apes and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The other newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm.

6. Again, replace a third original ape with a new one. The new one makes it to the stairs and is attacked as well. Two of the four apes that beat him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs, or why they are participating in the beating of the newest ape.

7. After replacing the fourth and fifth original apes, all the apes which have been sprayed with cold water have been replaced.

Regarding: “The UFO craze in North Bergen began in earnest on January 12”

The 1/12 date is not a coincidence. It is very meaningful. In the motion picture 2001 Space Odyssey the artificial intelligence which prompts violence at the birth of man and eventually tries to override and annihilate the human spiritual/intellectual component states it was born on January 12.

Recall as well from Jeff’s Grave Mysteries:

“Let's take, for instance, Indrid Cold: the name of the unearthly figure haunting West Virginia in the mid-60s during the Mothman flap. "Indrid Cold" has a numerical value of 112, which resolves in the "English Qaballa" to "We are one."

This phrase is also commonly heard during exorcisms. When a priest asks the possessing entity to identify itself, the truly possessed will often answer “we are one.”

“They” are one collectively, but so are we. And that is what the illegitimate intelligence has been working hard to suppress. They suppress it on a secular level as well as spiritual level.

There is nothing random and there are no coincidences, as they would have us to believe. We are one in 8112 because God is the only legitimate and infinite intelligence. And that intelligence equals truth and truth is beauty. Sans the infinity of “8” you have a collective lie.

Actually Jeff, I heard on NPR that Dr. Freeman once lobotomized two patients at once as a demonstration. One with each hand. Can you picture the position he'd be in? Or maybe that should read DEMONstration.

"Two days after Stith had his close encounter, he told his family that he had a dream about the Miss America pageant....'My father named the winner'...Two weeks later, it all happened just like Stith predicted"

Ya know, I had a close encounter with an alien and a dog and then I predicted the winner of the Miss America pageant...and the winner is...Tony Snow!

We see a tension between "waking up" to our "paraconnectedness," and yet to become aware of how connected we may be impugns our individuality--If we are all part of an overmind or collective unconscious, to what extent are we really individuals at all? To embrace individuality may lead some people to deny interconnections, especially in the spooky borderlands of the mental realm. Therefore, is it really surprising that knowledge of such a thing might lead people like Gates and Rockefeller to use it to encourage use of education for creation of automatons and to bring reality closer to Brave New World?

But even though that seems bleak, there is also a duality to "doing something better than our predecessors did." Consider Gurdjieff, whose philosophy allowed disciples to do things most people would find impossible by way of focus and discipline. To study borderlands phenomena is to abandon the dualistic good/bad and black/white divisions of morality. Some will see this and determine that morality is irrelevent, something to be abandoned, something we have outgrown in gaining our new understanding.

And yet, it is essential that those who study the borderlands phenomena have a strong moral sense to avoid being washed up in a world where morality is altogether lost and "do as thou wilt" becomes the whole of the law. Even here, paraconnectedness suggests that we owe one another certain duties that complete amorality cannot recognize. It is much easier to live by a concrete law, but when the world ceases to be concrete, we must resort to more flexible principles to maintain morality and the possibility of human goodness.

Here, appearances are deceiving. We are connected in such undeniable ways as sharing the same air, drinking water that has been drunk hundreds of times before, and being made of stardust. Nevertheless, we retain defining elements of individuality. Things that seem superficially mutually exclusive actually require one another and coexist in ongoing dynamic tension. The yin-yang, "good and evil," and perhaps spirit and matter. Or maybe the distinction is even more subtle than we know. I think there is a spark in some people that will re-emerge in each generation, and individuality cannot be wholly suppressed. You cannot destroy a universal correlate such as evil, darkness, or chaos, as doing so would necessarily do away with goodness, light, and order.

"About five months ago, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that lobbyist Brent Wilkes (co-conspirator #1 in the Duke Cunningham scanal) knew how to "grease the wheels" of Congress with cash, gifts, favors, and yes, "hospitality suites".....

"I have now interviewed about 12 or 13 retired military people that were actually directly involved in the surveillance of abductees and they came to the conclusion that these things were kind of like tied in with the realm of the dead. They weren't aliens but were some sort of poorly understood phenomenon that interacts with our species....

"...there was a fear on the part of the military and intelligence world that these creatures were demonic like and that they fed tulpa style on human souls and that their purpose in interacting with us was to harvest human souls as a kind of emotional feeding for themselves."

Thanks for the Redfern quote. (I just picked up his On the Trail of the Saucer Spies and haven't read it yet.) His words remind me of Ray Boeche's, from this post last summer:

"The following is an edited version of material given to me in late 1991 - early 1992, by two scientists who claim to be working in weapons research and development for the Department of Defense.... They described an obsessive effort to contact and attempt to control what they referred to as "non-human intelligences" (NHI), and to harness these NHI for military and intelligence uses.

"The efforts had progressed well past attempts at practical applications of David Bohm's theories, and had grown to encompass the use of, according to their statements, 'satanic rituals / ritual magic along the lines of that espoused by Aleister Crowley, including human sacrifices.'

"These gentlemen stated their concerns that, even when they were apparently able to harness or channel these forces or abilities for 'good' uses, the force would 'turn,' and ultimately all of those subjects involved suffered varying degrees of negative effects from contact with these forces. They are convinced that what is being tapped into in all instances is evil, and that this research should cease."

I am a new reader of RI.I am cautious of the Conspiracy underground but, like many, I search for real journalism as it's quietly dying in all other media. Even something Democracy Now! is becoming mainstream.I have overdosed on Jeff's work in the last few weeks & congratulate him on his thinking.However, this 'stuff' about UFO's & aliens os really offputting. This post today is an example. I guarantee you, if I had visyed this blog for the first time today, I would never have returned.Jeff, this is your blog & you can write about knitting if you choose but you are not doing the anaylsis of Deep Politics any favours by thses constant sidetracks into horseshit.Thank you.

I will not fear. Beset by a constant barrage of bogeyman, I am living in a surreal world of talking rabbits who are late and mad men with hats. What is a sane person to do? I must be crazy, but I can't be crazy because crazy people don't know that they are crazy. I have given up any semblance of hope for our country. I am not a defeatist as much as I am a realist. We walk around and perform our daily rituals for what purpose? I listen, I talk, I see, I feel and I taste the overwhelming bile that rises from the depths of my soul and am sickened. Throughout all of these actions that I and my fellow humans do, we are left with a sinking, lonely feeling in our gut. THIS IS NOT WORKING. The United States government has been taken over. There is no doubt in what is left of my mind that this has occured. The evidence is there for the feeblest of minds to see. Yet, in our sensual world we hear, but choose to selectively listen. We talk in hushful ways lest the powers hear our dissent (sedition.) We see horror and visualize the opposite because we are special. We feel this uniqueness based upon some 19th century belief in god and "manifest destiny" or some other claptrap. Worst of all the ways in which we experience this life is the taste of blood that is on our lips and digested within to make us this way. Our brains are the source of our power. They receive all that we experience. The good, the bad and the ugly. This guides our rationalizations and generalizations and is the source of our logic and ultimately, our wisdom. Our hearts guide us in the moral and ethical realm. Used in tandem with the brain it balances us and makes us more whole. The soul (our gut) is a place for introspection, perception and instinct. We use our senses most in this inner realm because it is here that we will override our hearts and our brains to draw a conclusion. We have yet to learn the most about ourselves because of this. The most oblivious of our inner selves are divided naturally; penis/vagina, male/female, ying/yang, etc... Yet to deny the existence of a force as powerful as this is to our detriment. A whole person is one who is connected with all aspects of the physical (sensual) and the metaphysical. Our reproductive organs cross over to both worlds. Our language and actions betray a hidden knowledge within all of us of this existence. This is our basis for life and living and the basis for a male dominated society. The differences in sex and the ability of men to act with their cocks has ruined the whole balance. The male organ is perceived as one of force and mastery. The female organ is then accepted as one of acceptance and servitude. These peceptions pervade because of male dominance. This is our legacy. This is the basis for every negative thought since the first of our kind learned politics. All of us know we have our physical selves (nerves, muscles, circulatory systems, bone and skin) to remind us we are finite. This is where our power is exhibited. This is where we truly earn our place as a human. How we balance all these factors (the physical and the metaphysical) determines our relevance or irrelevance to the human condition and its possible futures. Our lives revolve around a sun that made us. We are truly stardust. I have tried to find a reason for living/unliving. I can only adhere to my parental fores. I survive because I was best adapted to survive. I see a major flaw with this type of evolutionary thinking. Humans have changed the rules because of our uniqueness. Not a national/tribal/family uniqueness, but a HUMAN uniqueness. We may follow a darwinian sort of extinction, but it will be self-made. We are unique for our contradictions. We didn't survive evolution; we have supplanted it. Our political and social mores dictate our actions. I truly despise a country that can come up with The Constitution and at a time two hundred years hence become a bunch of religious and ethnic bigots. This is what I mean by contradictory (even though I know the USA is the leader in ethnic and religious cleansing; ideas in this document our universal.) I await our future with a baited breath. We are doomed and this is our fate. The world's population is almost beyond control and the elites (corporate masters) want a clean cut (depopulation.) We have many solutions available to us, but the sad fact is none of them will be heard until this planet is rid of those who think with their dicks are gone and the women who enable them are made sterile. Fear will not save a soul. Fear will bind the less intelligent to their masters at their own detriment. Balance is the only guiding light, but it will never be. Religions may try, but they will revert to the male-sexual model. The ones who are truly spiritual will be looked upon as weak and left to die. Chestbeating will outweigh pondering and we will become what we have always been; violent apes.

"Perhaps madness may be said to be close to genius, or the psychotic to the mystic, because certain mental illnesses disable our holographic readers, leaving a paranoid schizophrenic with a inate sense of the interconnectedness of things but without a way of interpretation, and so a crippling ego confusion settles in."

I think the crippling ego confusion is what stops the mad people from making the jump to enlightenmeant.

I have a bit of experiences with crazy people, outside of institutions, a lot of my original crew of "pyschonauts" are out there and struggling to get back.

It seems to have something to do with "grounding".

You can use reality as a symbol system and ground people by getting them to work in a garden. That seems to work in a temporary way. It works well tho.

Ego is a trap, you live in it but you are not of it (like the world).

I was raised as a catholic, and my family taught me that the important thing about these religions was self sacrifice self reflection and self improvement. There is something outside the self that is awesome and beautiful and if we become aware of it, it can inspire us to live to the best of our ability.

To reflect it or something.

Ego and fear and an inability to laugh at ourself can interfere with our perception of the awesomeness of it all. Making us seem more or less important than we actually are. And what happens around us more, or less importantant than it really is.

Funny that you post abut forgetting that we have forgetten.

Micheal ventura wrote that we were living ina time of technological dark ages. He talked about a conversation with his teenage son, about how his son could see no hope for the future.

"Its just so fucked" was apparantly what his son said.

His only solution, the only one he could offer was that we are in the darkest of dark ages. The only thing we can do is try and keep alive that which is important to us. That gives us meaning and moves us in the deepest parts of our soul. If we can hold on to these important things. Remember them and pass them on for others to remember them, when the dark age passes hughmanitee will come good again.

But it can only come good if we keep the meme ry of what is good alive.

The dead are with us, they watch us and love us and want us to join them, but only in the fullness of time. Thats why our culture is so scared of the dead and death. Cos we know when we join them, we will be ashamed of ourselves and how we failed them, how we didn't maintain the dignity honour and compassion that being human requires. How we didn't keep that alive and pass it on to our descendants.

"Perhaps madness may be said to be close to genius, or the psychotic to the mystic, because certain mental illnesses disable our holographic readers, leaving a paranoid schizophrenic with a inate sense of the interconnectedness of things but without a way of interpretation, and so a crippling ego confusion settles in."

I think the crippling ego confusion is what stops the mad people from making the jump to enlightenmeant.

I have a bit of experiences with crazy people, outside of institutions, a lot of my original crew of "pyschonauts" are out there and struggling to get back.

It seems to have something to do with "grounding".

You can use reality as a symbol system and ground people by getting them to work in a garden. That seems to work in a temporary way. It works well tho.

Ego is a trap, you live in it but you are not of it (like the world).

I was raised as a catholic, and my family taught me that the important thing about these religions was self sacrifice self reflection and self improvement. There is something outside the self that is awesome and beautiful and if we become aware of it, it can inspire us to live to the best of our ability.

To reflect it or something.

Ego and fear and an inability to laugh at ourself can interfere with our perception of the awesomeness of it all. Making us seem more or less important than we actually are. And what happens around us more, or less importantant than it really is.

Funny that you post abut forgetting that we have forgetten.

Micheal ventura wrote that we were living ina time of technological dark ages. He talked about a conversation with his teenage son, about how his son could see no hope for the future.

"Its just so fucked" was apparantly what his son said.

His only solution, the only one he could offer was that we are in the darkest of dark ages. The only thing we can do is try and keep alive that which is important to us. That gives us meaning and moves us in the deepest parts of our soul. If we can hold on to these important things. Remember them and pass them on for others to remember them, when the dark age passes hughmanitee will come good again.

But it can only come good if we keep the meme ry of what is good alive.

The dead are with us, they watch us and love us and want us to join them, but only in the fullness of time. Thats why our culture is so scared of the dead and death. Cos we know when we join them, we will be ashamed of ourselves and how we failed them, how we didn't maintain the dignity honour and compassion that being human requires. How we didn't keep that alive and pass it on to our descendants.

UFos and animal weirdness goes hand in hand, not just screen memory stuff, but weirdness.

Did you know about the "killer Rabbit" that attacked a former US president?

The facade of "normalcy" is used by political types to get up to all sorts of nastiness. Whenever that facade cracks it exposes the nasty, dirty things behind.

UFos are an easy thing to write off because of all the crap in the culture about them. B ut what is a UFO.

An unidentified flying object. Not an et spaceship, something in the sky that is unusual and unknown. Although I have never found it, author John Shirley claims there is a report by French Intelligence concluding that UFO abduction is fake. They claim to have imitated abduction in the early 900s using available technologies. Ie helicoptors with bright lights, drugs costumes etc etc.

they assume cos they have done it someone else is apparantly.

Now this could be a good or bad assumption, who knows?

But if intelligence agencies show an interest in something, that immediately makes it interesting in itself. If it is some form of mindfuck with no basis in reality, the reasons for this must be exposed in a democracy, by definition that should be what happens in a democracy.

Magic secrecy and power always go together, cos all societies use some form of magic to function. A red light is a form of magic. People stop their cars when they come to them.

A few words, as I think without perhaps realizing it you've homed in on it, and this time you're on an unobstructed path; you've been closer several times but blocked an overly-insistent sticking to the wordframes with which you found your way there...by analogy, you are currently on foot halfway up the ascent, whereas before you were perhaps only a few metres from the top but observing from behind the windows of an aeroplane -- the aeroplane brought you closer than you are now, but could never bring you there. I suggest that the concept of the holographic universe is such an aeroplane for you, best abandoned so as to move forward.

In physics, and in particularly in quantum physics, one has counterintuitive phenomena like entanglement, which I think you've mentioned in your blog but which I will resummarize to make sure we're all on the same page:

2 particles -- electrons, say -- that will interact when brought close are brought close and left unobserved post interaction, and allowed to go their separate ways likewise unobserved; at some later point one of the particles is then observed. For interesting things to happen one needs a pair of particles that, say, must have entered into mutually-exclusive states at the time of interaction -- ie, one particle with spin 'up' and the other with spin 'down' -- and in such a situation the fact of the matter is that prior to observation neither particle is in either state; once one particle is observed, however, its state crystallizes into one of the options, and at that time the state of the other particle crystallizes into the opposite...instantaneously. The instantaneousness is the puzzle, because if the change of state is a result of some signal passed from one particle to the other than that signal must have travelled instantaneously, which is believed impossible; thus the instantaneous state change is beleived not to result from a signal but because, in some sense, the pair of particles are one thing, only the pair of endpoints of which we actually observe.

Or, in other words, the particles upon interacting make up some compex of whch only the original particles are visible to us...think of a very large iceberg, most of which is submerged, and only a pair of peaks, separated by miles, poke out above the ocean surface. Now imagine a band of intrepid explorers dumping a large amoung of ballast onto one of the peaks, enough ballast to sink the entire berg: would they not be taken aback if they did not know the peaks to be (or even could be) connected, and saw that the other peak, miles away, began sinking instantaneously with the peak near them?

From this standpoint -- the working assumption that the kinds of strange, instantaneous communication of the subatomic world in fact reflect a hidden interconnectedness of the communicating objects -- one can jump straight to the holographic universe and the 'everything is connected to everything' theory of things, and although not necessarily wrong it at once goes too far and not far enough, and is best forgotten once its lessons are learned.

Let us move on to ufo synchronicities. We will need to discuss a particular assumption that makes these seem more confusing than they need to be: it is so common an assumption as to forever go unstated that the 'real world' exists prior to and independently of our names for it. This assumption seems well-grounded enough that questioning it is largely reserved for fools and solipists -- after all, the world does not disappear when you turn your back -- but let us suppose for the moment that the inverse was in fact the case: that names are some primary, if not for us than for something living near us.

Let us now suppose that for some reason -- perhaps mundane, perhaps entirely beyond our ken -- something for which names are primary has homed in on and would like to experiment on 'Everett'; suppose also that this thing is, for lack of a better word, clumsy, and thus in reaching for Everett its apparati behave more like chocolate-covered, chubby fingers than needlenose pliars. What we wind up seeing is, of couse, an apparently perplexing pair of largely-similar incidents happening in or to similarly-named things with no apparent connection; what we should be seeing is one-and-the-same thing happening to two different recipients, or, better yet, one-and-the-same-thing being done to something that in the doer's mind is a single thing -- Everett -- that only when it translates back into our perceptions of things appears to be multiple things.

Or, as a second attempt: just as in our study of the physical world we eventually hit a handicap in which we are hindered by our inability to see the thing of which our pair of entangled electons are but two projections, it may also be the case that other minds or kinds of being may be hindered by an inability to see the many things a referent maps to in the real world, and thus when their probes home in onto what are to them particular, singular signals we see synchronicities and bizarre, parallel events...more than this is hard to say with any degree of certainty.

I am not the writer Mr. Wells is -- I tend to believe that the clarity of expression reflects the depth of understanding, but I'll be damned if this topic is one well-suited to coherent explanation...perhaps I too do not understand it as well as I'd like.

Empires arise out of an inability of a people to govern themselves... no one can agree... and the bickering partisans being the idiots they are, force a third party to step in and assume control in order to maintain the empire.

When people become ungovernable, and can't agree anymore but are simply concerned with their own self interest, well this condition can't last obviously, so the whole ball of wax either devolves into chaos or authoritarians step in and bludgeon the unchained "beast" back in line through oppression and restraints on freedom.

Of course it doesn't help when the guys at the top are actually trying to frustrate us all by rigging the game to make us fail...

But that's the way history works. You let up on your resolve and someone will step in and steal the rug out from under you.

In the old testament, for what its worth, this is what all of the prophets spoke of when they said men became "marked" (ie. owned like cattle) by masters. In the book of revelation it became "the mark of the beast." Meaning you are no longer free and are under a seal of someone else's ownership. The whole jacob and esau thing where one brother has no self-discipline and the other becomes his master....

"What Dreams May Come?"

Well, no one wants to be a slave.... Americans in particular... these aren't the dark ages... we may be ignorant at times but not that ignorant... people will wise up and sort this shit out

Thankyou...thankyou...you may give me your money now or I shall turn you into toads by merely saying the magic(shudder)words....................................

Intriguing post Jeff. I realise for those who have never experienced an authentic UFO event are at a great disadvantage to those that have. Frankly I don't understand why some of them even care or believe some of the stories out here. I certainly wouldn't.Ruling out peculiar fuzzy lights but not to deny them any possibilies,the few bona fide witnesses to very close, very large objects I have met are genuinely baffled and deeply disturbed by the event, changing their outlook on life substantially,

The information in your post I believe is all connected to each other somehow and might relate to something vague I refer to as the trickster.

In the event some of your readers unexpectedly encounter a BIG one, I have some advice:

1 - KEEP YOU HEAD and remain calm, immediately write down what time it is.2 - Look around you and gather some rocks and stuff them in your pockets.

3 - Stand perfectly erect looking at the craft and make note of the tilt of your head then stretch your arms perfectly straight in front of you so your fingers touch each end of what you see and make note of the size and height off the ground in relation to your location.

4- Finally, if it's still there and you have the nerve, get close enough to hit it with the rocks you have in your pocket. Make note of whether the rocks passed through or bounced off it and what kind of sound occurred.

If the sighting occurred with other witnesses with you. Each of you should remain quiet until you have all written down a description of the event in your own words. Don't be surprised if when comparing notes they don't match up!

This is like trying to convince someone of the reality of God, without experiencing the undeniable they stand at a great disadvantage.

Having fallen off a mountain and now you're airborn at 4,000 feet, guess how much time you have to talk to God...and survive the fall.

“To study borderlands phenomena is to abandon the dualistic good/bad and black/white divisions of morality.”

For me, the word morality does not quite fit for ending that sentence. I like it better when finished with the terms first order morality or 'fixed categories'.

Because morality is related to the violation of social conventions, we become inhibited in questioning said conventions. If the conventions themselves freeze our ability 'look-anew' at our experience then immorality can be simply dressed up as morality.

Dualism allows morality to be defined through our pretences, where both religious and secular folk are provided with their preferred narcotic. The pretences result from a crude and inadequate first principle.

A second order level for morality may be found in taking responsibility for the shaping of our relationship to the ineffable. It will require new attitudes to bring the pre-manifest into more positive expressions of the manifest.

Looking through the glass darkly, we are still driven- to try to see, and apprehend.

Anonymous @ 12:12 AM hints at names being important structural elements of reality. I thought I'd share some experiments I've been working on. Taking some hints from Goroadachi on geographic clues (e.g. the "Axis of Satan", a great circle upon which the cities of DC, NY, Boston, Paris, Venice, and the West Bank lie, and Mexico City and New Orleans if you're willing to accept a 50 mile error), I developed some simple software to investigate where certain great circles, defined by directions that have personal significance to me, intersect. Some weird stuff came out. It could be my imagination (i.e. my attempts to project structure on random data) but it also could be meaningful. For example, the circle following the direction followed by the name of a famous street which bears my surname, and the circle connecting two cities I lived in early in my life, intersect at a location that bears my first name.

If anybody were interested in doing similar experiments, I'd be happy to post the software and simple directions on how to use it.

Rep. Ron Paul, a Texas Republican, said the bill reminds him of a 1998 congressional resolution – the Iraq Liberation Act – that paved the way for the Iraqi debacle. Yet most of the "antiwar" contingent in the House of Representatives caved and voted in favor, including Democrats John Conyers, Maxine Waters, Jack Murtha, Bernie Sanders, Barbara Lee, and Lynn Woolsey.

.....

The bill was opposed by the Bush administration, which officially holds that diplomacy is the way to go on the Iranian nukes issue.

Gump Worsley, the ice hockey goaltender affectionally known as "the Gumper", was vehemently opposed to wearing a mask. When asked about why he chose to go without he told reporters "My face is my mask."

Just like old Gumper's mask, these pasty face strangers Jeff brings to our attention ARE those that they seek.

It is easy to conceive of misperception in which we perceive pieces of a single object as distinct, separate entities; at least at the subatomic level entanglement phenomena give us a concrete example of a situation in which we know (or think we know) that -- at least for the time between interaction and subsequent observation -- the pair of entangled particles in fact comprise merely the two visible components of a single entity (say, an entanglon), as the existence of such an entity is the only way to reconcile the particles' behavior with what we take to be the ground rules of the universe (state undetermined prior to observation, no communication faster than light speed, etc.).

So, we have reasoned our way to a situation where we _know_ that the things we see are but aspects of some single object, but the sum total of our perceptual and experimental apparati are unable to actually see that single object (the "entanglon")...and thus we hit something of a wall in our attempts to probe the properties of those objects (the "entanglons").

We do have some experimental protocols that are able to indirectly measure the properties of this unseen object (the "entanglon"), but to something capable of observing the object (the "entanglon") directly our methods would probably appear awkward, clumsy, and -- depending on whether or not this something watching us was able to comprehend that we were unable to directly observe the object (the "entanglon") -- either comical or bizarre...and, certainly, an awful lot of trouble to go to to observe something so readily apparent to it.

The above is a long-winded attempt to elaborate on the problem of being incapable of seeing the 'real thing' of which apparently-separate objects are a part, _even when we know_ that those objects are all simply parts of some bigger 'real thing'; that quantum mechanics provides with a very real example of this problem is interesting -- and why I chose that example -- but not necessarily relevant as anything other than a very real, concrete example of an inability-to-see-the-whole-for-the-parts phenomenom.

Now, we should look at the opposite possibility: a congenital inability to see the parts for the whole, as it were. Finding concrete exapmles of this problem is much harder, and all of the examples I can come up do not convey the full depth of the problem...just as the can't-see-the-whole-for-the-parts means that, _despite knowing there is a whole to be seen_, we categorically cannot see that whole, so it is possible to conceive of knowing that this entity we have taken to be 'whole' is composed of many parts and yet remaining unable to see those parts as parts.

So let us now assume the position of some entities sitting outside of or adjacent to the version of the world we humans call home -- perhaps we are living information circulating about in the nousphere, perhaps we are simply residents of some other here just a few parallel universes over, etc. -- and suppose furthermore that what ties us together with the human world is not necessarily matter or thought but language; now suppose further that just as humans suffer from the can't-see-the-whole-for-the-parts problem we suffer from the can't-see-the-parts-for-the-whole problem, and suppose further still that for some reason we want to send a probe to 'Everett'...we may well know that once 'Everett' is translated over into the human world that it is a manyfold thing -- sometimes a persons' name, sometimes a town, etc. -- but be unable to see any of the particular things that collectively make up what for us is, despairingly, a monolithic object to probe.

So, we send our probe off to 'Everett', doing our best to limit it's scope and size, but resigned to the fact that when it arrives it'll perhaps interact with what it should be seeing as many different things but instead can only, clumsily, interact with as a single unit; thus for it Everett the city and Everett the nearby person are one and the same -- even if it knows better -- and what we perceive as a syncrhonicity is, in fact, the same probe stretched past the limits of its ability to focus.

Is the whole which we can't see sentient? And if so as a unit or fragmented?

Or does it need our sentience to organise it into a conceivable impression of what we need to see for us to see it upon or just prior to perceiving it? Might explain why the parts we see appear to be familiar but not completely rational or consistent as we would expect.

Why some UFOs appear slightly to grossly different from one another yet bear some relation to the epoch or culture at the time they are perceived.

Any thoughts on how or what might govern the unseen portion? Do the parts we see respond to any of our known laws of physics?

"Chocolate-covered fingers vs. needle-nose pliers" dude: you seem at pains to try to accurately express your point of view. Just a little piece of unsolicited advice: don't make it harder than it needs to be. Your chocolate-covered fingers vs. needle-nose pliers analogy was what hit home with me: simple, direct, concrete, and speaking to the senses.

When I read your two intriguing posts, here's what I took away:

First, assume that there is something we can call "the other side" but which we can't really experience directly, under normal circumstances.

Second, assume there are some sorts of "people" on the other side who would like to experience "our side."

Third, assume some of our borderland experiences can be explained by the people on the other side trying to experience our side.

Fourth, DON'T assume the people on the other side know what they're doing--or that the people on the other side are driven by the same motivations as we are, or that the same rules of logic apply on the other side, or even that they're doing it on purpose.

Taken together, these four suppositions could explain phenomena such as the North Bergen sightings or those described by Keel or Vallee or Forte.

Now, Chocolate-covered Fingers Dude, I may have completely misread you, but even if I have, you've given me a lot to think about. I wonder if your explanation about entanglement is an analogy, or if you're suggesting that entanglement itself may be the mechanism by which the people on the other side try to experience our side. Either way, it's really interesting to entertain the idea. Thanks so much for your contribution.

Fat Lady: chocolate-smearing man here, you've got the gist of it. I brought up the entanglement b/c it's a usual lead-in to the holographic universe theory, which I'm pretty sure Jeff's been pretty into lately. It's also important for another reason: it's an example of reality playing hardball with our ability to see it, because although we can indirectly observe the entanglement we appear to be unable to _ever_ directly observe it; it's analagous to seeing a lot of trees and knowing that that many trees make a forest but being forever unable to see the forest for the trees.

I think some of our neighbors on the other sides suffer from a related but different problem: some of them seem to pick or focus on their targets almost linguistically:

Recon Officer: Captain, we're getting strong readings on the 'Everett' symbol over here.Captain: how coherent is it? Do we have crosstalk or dispersal patterns?Recon Officer: No, it looks good, pretty coherent, apparently a pretty geographically-contained locus of activity with neighboring activity directed at the locus and a rapid dropoff with distance.Captain: Fantastic, let's release a probe.---Recon Officer: Crap! Our readings are coming out garbled?Captain: What happened?Recon Officer: Can't say for sure. Perhaps what we've been taking for a tightly-coherent activity pattern is actually two patterns superimposed with mostly-overlapping centers of activity.Captain: So the probe's getting multiple overlapping subsignals we can't tell from noise?Recon Officer: Appears so.Captain: Sigh, another useless launch.

If we were on our hypothetical UFO launching probes to Everett we'd frustrated because our probe returned useless results: they'd be noisy and not make a lot of sense, and we could conclude that our probe must've been interacting with multiple targets; we wouldn't necessarily be able to see those multiple targets, but because our probe's output made such little sense we'd know that it must've encountered more than one thing. We would probably be trying to find signals with tight centers of activity and limited extent—this doens't guarantee an accurate target but improves the odds a bit.

So our ufo occupants wind up disppointed that they couldnt' get a clean reading of whatever they were trying to target; if we were them it seems like we'd only see our probe making contact with some single object--names of things seem to be what gets targeted--and then be upset when what came back was a scrambled mess.

We on the other hand wind up confused: why are similar weird little men showing up, once to a guy named Everett and once in the town of Everett? What really happened is that a single object arrived at two places that were for it a single place and got observed at slightly different angles by the locals at each place; the apparent synchronicity is precisely because it's the same thing, at what for it is the same place.

I'd be surprised if all synchronicities happened this way or if all the ufo phenomena were the result of such stuff but there's a particular category of events that does fit this model rather neatly; moreover, the events that fit this model all feature synchronicities recognizable because of linguistic similarities anomalies, etc. ("Indred Cole", Everett, Point Pleasant, etc.) and thus it sems that somehow words or word-reality associations are some kind of beacon across sides...if that's the case a lot of the linguistic games, etc., found in various ritual prescriptions make a different kind of sense, as well.

'it's an example of reality playing hardball with our ability to see it, because although we can indirectly observe the entanglement we appear to be unable to _ever_ directly observe it; it's analagous to seeing a lot of trees and knowing that that many trees make a forest but being forever unable to see the forest for the trees.'

Anonymous attempts to explain a concept that fat lady seems to get. Looks to me that we have a problem of scale, but both anon and the lass are correct - just not as deep as it seems to go. We place ourselves in the middle and assign an arbitrary value of one. we are one, so to speak. We can conceptualize avogadro's number, which leaves us 10 to the minus 23rd down, plus then the subatomics, quarks and perhaps strings.

On the other side, astronomers keep finding new galaxies and far away distant objects like black holes. We can now conceptualize 10 to the 25th. This gives us a range of 60 powers of ten (awesome website out of FSU, but you'll have to find it for yourself). Our range of observation is limited to plus or minus three - a grain of sand to our solar system. With magnification, which most of us cannot use, 'they' tell us that certain things exist.

I include dr. lenny in the they, because i am well versed in the theory that we use as chemistry. The duality of nature - particles and waves - is lost as a single one entity when it is divided into the component systems. But if we don't artificially divide it, it doesn't divide. Determinism is a self-fulfilling prophesy. If we use occam's razor - the simplist explanation is most likely, and combine it with schroedinger's cat's para-existance, then there must be a means of communicating with the other entities in nature that we are not using, which cuts us howdt of the loop. I should say consciously using.

At what level sentience? The dna known as nonsense dna has a purpose that is hardly nonsense. if my theory is true, it is a light receptor that can take crystal form in fluid of significant electronic capacity (blood, seawater). The would be 64 different sets of these codons and every sentient being can be in constant communication with other beings in it's 64 group. Whether the group is tunable or switchable or what remains to be seen, but lemme's poems channel too much of the thoughts of other sentient beings, both human and not for it to be simple coincidence. like dissolves like ... the sentience level seems to be water - which can interact by choice with DNA - the start of an energy cascade that is triggered in three phases.

now this intuition must be proved by rigorous determination of the facts available that allow thinking howdtside the box to conduct the necessary experimentation withhowdt interference. my guess is that it has been done before and has been stopped and restarted from time to time...

First off, this being my first posting here, my salutations to all you other commenters. Good as Jeff may be, the comments are equally thought provoking.

I want to comment myself on the distinctly theatrical quality to these encounters. In addition to the dog-nappers, we have all sorts of strange little scenes such as the giving of pancakes, which has been reported many times. Even the medical examinations seem more like what one one expect of 50's mad scientists than an advanced race. The ships appear to be put ons, as shown in the evolution from the funky beam-ships to todays sleek triangular affairs.

Surely this is all a put on. By whom? For what purpose? I have no idea. But I know show business when I see it.

Fat Lady - Very good summary but characterising the other side as people is too much of a stretch for me at this point.Saying "people" is placing a template of form defined by our senses and human experience upon an entity that up to now I am not convinced has form or even organised thought in the way we can conceive.

Noting the vast inconsistencies of reportage relating to this phenomenon across history and even going on today, what you say is salient. But I wonder if the phenomenon requires information from the viewer before hand or simultaneously to create imagery that our senses can comprehend?

In other words do the viewers unwittingly choreograph their own sighting subconsciously with information the entity some how accesses from the viewers mind either deliberately or passively?

Dr Lenny - Thankyou for your excellent input. Sorry for the ambiguity of what I'm about to ask but my memory fails to remember pertinent facts of name and place. However,do you have any knowledge of the research occuring in either Chicagoe or Philadelphia where a nano-metronome device is being constructed so when the armature swings one way it is inside our physical dimension but when it swings the other way it disappears into the quantum? I believe a Dr Crick initiated it before he died recently.

And are you aware of the research occuring somewhere in the south USA, perhaps Georgia. A doctor is trying to find where the human body can interact with the quantum. Scientists say it's too small a dimension to manifest biologically but he claims there is a protein in the shape of a tube that is present in our synapses that holds promise.

Can you address either subject relative to what you just told us?

Caradoc - I agree and an excellent question that adresses not only the issue in this post but can apply to all the other satanist, luciferian and governmental high weirdness posts appearing in the RI classroom.

A nanoscale metronome identifies DNA strands at the level of individual base pairs. The four-arm DNA molecule rapidly switches back and forth between shapes, changing speed when specific strands of DNA attach to two of the arms. It could be used to identify DNA strands that differ by as little as a single base pair.

(Single Molecule Nanometronome, Nano Letters, March 8, 2006)

A quantum is a discreet packet of energy produced by the electron being excited from one atomic orbital to another and then emitting the energy as light as it reenvelops the ground state. My current thinking system gives the molecules of different elements the ability to modulate the fields, so that they can absorb energy for excitation at one wavelength and reemit it at a different lower energy wavelength, thus harvesting the difference in energy. Einstein believed that this occurs via E=mc2 - but i beleive that the c2 term is relativistic too - c is not constant as assumed. depends on scale.Thus georgia might be on the right track, but i think smaller. what if enzyme activiation takes place using water as a key card type device that gets produced by chemical reaction and primes the pump - pushing everything along by one unit and knocking the last molecule on the end off into the blood stream. If the individual water molecule has a choice to bond or not to bond, then it demonstrates sentience in acting on that choice. Enzymes need lattice water in key positions in the structural unit to enable the proper geometry for repeated efficiency - this water demonstrates entirely different properties from pure water or ionic solutions. early chemistry - when the field was more descriptive than theoretical may hold some of the relevant answers - but finding unfiltered materials is getting vastly more difficult these days.

Hi Mako: if this thread hasn't been abandoned quite yet, perhaps you, Dr. Lenny, and our entanglement theorist will see this. Just wanted to thank you for your comments and elaborations.

In particular, Mako, you wrote: "Very good summary but characterising the other side as people is too much of a stretch for me at this point.Saying "people" is placing a template of form defined by our senses and human experience upon an entity that up to now I am not convinced has form or even organised thought in the way we can conceive."

Actually, I agree completely. I was using the term "people" as kind of a shorthand for some sort of something that may or may not have intention or even consciousness...I suppose "entity" is a good word to use, but even that imposes a kind of template. Interesting that this comes back to words/labels/linguistic targets/signifiers etc.

At any rate, as a sci-fi reader since early childhood, I've always thought that first contact stories don't cut it. My suspicion is that if we can imagine it, it probably WON'T happen that way. Perhaps I ought to have added cautionary clause: don't make any assumptions.

Mako, you also wrote:"But I wonder if the phenomenon requires information from the viewer before hand or simultaneously to create imagery that our senses can comprehend?

In other words do the viewers unwittingly choreograph their own sighting subconsciously with information the entity some how accesses from the viewers mind either deliberately or passively?"

I suppose one might argue that we unwittingly choreograph every interaction with have with the world. With this silly brain-thing in the way, our every experience is mediated-- or is that "meat-iated"? (insert groan here).

If we can comprehend a phenomenon in any manner, it is due to the fact that we can test it against input from previous experience. Otherwise those who experience "unusual" things wouldn't be able to describe them at all. Does the phenomenon "require" our linguistic capabilities to manifest itself? Does it only happen if there is someone there to describe it? If a tree falls in a forest...

Thanks all of you for a refreshing foray into ontology and phenomenology!

Thankyou Dr Lenny for responding to my questions. I'm not academically trained to give a just response to such deep matters as you discuss. I find myself racing to the dictionary which is in itself a pleasure, learning about such matters.

BUT I can visualise very well and somehow I can make sense of all this with pictures in my head.

A young lad I know happens to be involved with this research and relates some fascinating stuff hot off the bunsen burner so to speak, when he visits.It's such a pleasure to see hard science plodding along and substantiating what many frustrated dreamers have been sensing all along.I'll take notes next time I see him.

I truly believe there is an explanation for absolutely everything no matter how far fetched. Most of us are crawling along on all fours in a cavernous darkened room looking for the exit or at least the water fountain. Some of us can faintly hear it in the distance but it's disciplined scholars who will map it out for those who can't or won't believe.

Syn Diesel - Thanks for the link, it's absolutely spellbinding to see Daniel Tammet go from question to answer with out having to do all the sweaty in between stuff, leaving it to some formless void in his head to deliver a picture of the answer.It's similar to how aspergers syndrome works for some.

A neurologist once said to me, they've nearly completed a map of the brain yet inspite of all they know they're absolutely baffled by the fact that it works at all! They simply can't explain why or how the whole thing works as a unit.There are some theories but not a single shred of conclusive evidence that substantiates one or another.

Fat Lady - Check out Syn Diesels supplied link. There are intriguing implications for what we are discussing in how Daniel arrives at his answers.

And the limitations of language has always frustrated me. I see so many strings on this blog that simply keep tripping over semantics when they're all really talking about the same thing.

Fat Lady - Just one other thing. You said, "Does the phenomenon "require" our linguistic capabilities to manifest itself? Does it only happen if there is someone there to describe it?." Now THAT is a question we can really sink our teeth into.

Do "they or it" need us more than we need "them or it" in order to manifest anything, or survive or be aware of "their or its" own existence?

Why limit it to borderland phenomenon, how about to every idea that pops into our heads, both "good" and "bad". In that sense we are gatekeepers to what is permitted to manifest here on earth.

Speak of an idea and you give it life, believe it and you give it wings, do it and you give it legs...YOUR legs. How many diddlers would mess with kids if they all said to them selves, "Uh-uh, I'm not going to let this pass!" This can apply to nearly everything we've done wrong in history.

And maybe the UFO is just another ploy for dialogue and manifestation, exploiting a flaw in our senses that permits them to project upon our senses an impression of contact to open further venues of access to our world. (Not to be confused with the non-"extra-terrestrial" nuts & bolts secret triangular craft I suspect are made by man.)

sounder: form and function are so interrelated, that function cannot occur in the absense of proper form. i also believe that everything has an explanation, and that subtly we are forming it. this thread, and the form of the thread as seen here at RI is a slightly different form than we are used to - we somehow picked up a momentum that spurs the continuance. As we tease the information out - if we change the form of discussion - into a live talk in a chat room, we change the temper of the conversation and would lose the ideas generated via the thread. This works - don't change now. But let's rotate the role of observer to the system and see what we did here that we different, because we have now spurred some things forward that i had been stuck with for a while.

emotionally, i have control over my temperment right now, but the physical reality is becoming so bizarre, that i am going to have to pay attention back to the real world of the mundane. but - what was the rock song - i can feel it - something in the air tonite... oh, ho.

now off to syn dieselland ( :-)) . also (does it mean something when the word verification is imiho - imho -in my (initial) honest opinion?

Maybe a bit late on this post, but a few points for anyone who's still listening.

Regarding the importance of language in human understanding. Remember that human brains have evolved along with human language. Everything we experience goes through the language filter, and it essentially defines our perception of reality. Add to this the fact that language is metaphore, not an expression of actual objective reality (to crib from RA Wilson 'the map is not the territory), and you arrive at the conclusion that all human experience is figurative, not literal.

As to neurologists not being able to make sense of how the brain works, I think that one of the problems with 'hard' science is that, while it's very good at breaking things down into it's component parts, it's not quite as good at explaining emergent qualities. The whole is always more than just the sum of its parts, and the whole's are usually parts themselves. Wheels within wheels you know.

And lastly, while it's tempting to get excited about the development of 'free energy' sources like zero-point (goodness knows anything looks good in comparison to the suicidal use of fossil fuels right about now), it's instructive to look at the damage we as a species have managed to do to our planet and ourselves with the relatively 'expensive energy' that we already have access to. It would seem prudent to reexamine our cultural trajectory a bit before adding any more fuel to the fire.